The Land is Alive

Thanks to inspiration from Gary Schneider's beautiful presentation on forests as part of the Protecting PEI Lands and Waters--It's Urgent wonderful series in which he presented first followed by the knowledgeable Megan Harris of Island Nature Trust as well as inspired by Gary's most recent excellent BUZZ essay on the beauty of Black Marsh I decided to share this text version of my May 2021 LAMP lecture as a message of hopefulness and healing in light of the most recent IPCC report. (headline statements from report)

The Land is Alive May 16th, 2021 for LAMP's 2021 Spring Education Program

Thank you so very much to LAMP for granting me this opportunity to share with you today. I am very grateful to be here.

(Pause and breathe.)

I would like to take a moment to tell you about myself. I am a mother of three young people whom I’ve shared the delight of raising with my husband Paul. While our children attended mainstream education for the early years, we’ve been a home-schooling family for the past eight. This granted us the space to spend lots of our time outdoors—to go on daily nature walks together, to garden, to bird watch.

Somehow, against the odds, we have raised three children with a deep sense of their connection to the living breathing world and whose lives reflect this connection.

I myself, had the good fortune of being raised by parents who knew the value of time spent close to the land. They took us on nature walks in all seasons and we witnessed them live their own quiet interest in the natural world of trees, mushrooms, lichens, birds and wildflowers, salamanders and spring peepers. I spent so much free time outdoors that I grew up knowing deep within me that I was a part of the greater whole; that nature was somewhere I had more of a sense of belonging than any building like a school.

That deep knowing is what brings me here today. My great Love of the Land which grants us food and Beauty, the Land from which we find shelter and which provides these things for All Living Beings-- The Land which is our shared home.

Which brings me to the following question:

What is it about the modern way we look at Land that allows us to forget that it is our Mother and that our ties to it are umbilical? What has caused us to hold this disconnect as a cultural norm?

I welcome you to look no further than the Cambridge dictionary’s definition of Land:

and I quote:

LAND:

the surface of the earth that is not covered by water:

which is a pretty cut and dry definition—so I will share with you some sentences the Cambridge dictionary offers to highlight the meaning of the word LAND:

And once again I quote:

It is cheaper to drill for oil on land than at sea.

The treaty has led to a dramatic reduction in the number of land-based missiles in Europe.

As well as:

This sort of land is no good for growing potatoes.

I always prosecute people who trespass on my land.

Now let us pause for a moment to consider what our collective acceptance of these phrases has meant for us as a civilization?

Do these usages reflect a sense that Land is Alive or does the language and following from that, the beliefs we hold about Land instead reflect an active deadening of Land? To me, Land viewed in this way creates a pathway for it to be subjugated, for us to dismiss it as possessing no inherent right to exist of its own accord and as being without purpose beyond that of serving the needs and whims of human enterprise.

I welcome us all to allow our hearts to heart swell with the sorrows of what such a colonial, capitalistic, patriarchal white person’s view of Land has done to Land. As well, I welcome us to contemplate with kindness and tremendous compassion to ourselves, those ways in which we’ve been tricked into believing that we are separate from Land--fooled by a system which benefits, thrives, in fact, on our participation in it.

(Breathe and pause.)

Now, I joyfully welcome you to the idea that LAND is ALIVE and is living, speaking, moving, being, around us, through us, in us.

We are part Land and Land is part us. We are Spirit, Water and Clay limbs of a living breathing Earth in a Wildly Alive Universe. We are not separate, rather, we are ONE!

Just step outside into a fine mist during the swell of early spring and try not to exclaim in jubilance—this is Life—the rhubarb is up, the chickadees are nesting, the smelts are in! The Island is a wellspring of growth and renewal. The Mi’kmaq people deeply knew this and harmoniously incorporated this knowledge into their entire way of being and their way of being stood the test of time.

Until.

Until white men and women came to change this; to tell them their way of understanding was all wrong. That there were better ways to live and they forced their ways upon Indigenous persons with a brutality which is only coming to light, to voice, to heart in recent days and has yet to be reconciled by the dominant culture.

May we pause to honour the destruction which has been wrought upon those who had and still have such love, knowledge and exuberant respect for the interconnection between the living Land, thirst-quenching Waters, and the Air, great breath of life that it is.

(Pause and breathe.)

There were many others too who knew the Land is alive. My Celtic ancestors knew to tend the sacred Land with care as it is from whence we’ve come and to whence we shall return.

Celtic poet John O’ Donohue knew this well. I share with you these words from his last recorded interview done with Krista Tippet prior to his death in 2008.

Well, I think it makes a huge difference, when you wake in the morning and come out of your house, whether you believe you are walking into dead geographical location, which is used to get to a destination, or whether you are emerging out into a landscape that is just as much, if not more, alive as you…

https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty-aug2017/

I think of my forebearers and our shared sense of wonder at watching a seed grow into nourishing, life giving food. I think as well of all the wonderful humans who grow food with such reverence for the life of soil; and of those fellow humans whose reverence demonstrates an understanding that the very Spirit of the Water and Land Protection Acts here refers to a sense of Affectionate Caring for the Aliveness of Land and Water, both. I sit in gratefulness for all which lives and moves in soil that allows us to have food, for the complexity of the microbiome of soil; of the way soil contains bacteria like those in our own guts and that these bacteria promote a sense of Well being when they touch our hands.

What is this, I ask you-- but Wonderful and Amazing—and Alive!

How cared for are we by this Land that so many disregard and devalue and destroy at every turn? I wonder at our choices as we desecrate with plastics, with chemicals and with development bylaws which do not demonstrate a true understanding of the pressing need for habitat for biodiversity. I grieve that the Land bears the burden of our collective folly.

Yet I continually marvel at the myriad ways it tries to tell its tale to those who’ll listen.

Which brings me to my listening; to how I listen and why.

(Pause and Breathe)

My earliest sense of the pulse of the living Earth came through play. I had the good fortune of a childhood filled with many hours of play in my yard, the horse fields across the road from me (now a senior’s living development) the pond down the road from my home (now suffering the effects of sedimentation and phosphorus net loading due to development) and the little wood which stands behind my current home. A little wood where we ran and jumped over fallen trees, set booby traps, built forts and another nearby small wood where we rode our bikes on trails which I now walk almost daily with my family.

I felt the land’s aliveness while making mudpies, picking wildflowers, poking at mushrooms, learning that bluing boletes bruise as easily as my own heart. I buried myself in dank piles of decaying autumn leaves and in winter, I crawled in snow kingdoms while winds blew wildly all around me. I felt at home in these places.

But then I forgot some of this. I got busy with life as I thought it was expected of me.

I still kept my kids close to Earth. I still whispered to them that the World is a Living Poem we get to recite by Heart. And in my times of greatest disconnect I still felt the Land calling me back to its Embrace. I knew that gazing upon a summer meadow or walking on woodland trails would restore me when I most needed replenishing.

But how could it restore me if it was not Alive?

Life begets life. Aliveness is all around us and within. This living Earth with all its communicating fungal networks and tree roots; it’s all one big web of amazing interconnection that we are part of and knowing this can heal us. And just as I have rebounded from my own bouts of disconnection-- so too can the human collective.

To do so we need a new way of thinking about our relationship with Earth. We need to realize that we are malleable enough to train to become beings who nurture a sense of the Sacredness of Earth. Imagine the Beauty and Healing that can be unleashed.

Mycelium researcher Dr Merlin Sheldrake believes that humans can look to the ancestral and continuing relationships fungi form with plants to see the ways this change can happen. In his research he delights in being changed by the very fungal processes he is studying. He believes that fungi have much to teach us about the world and how we perceive our place as humans in it.

And I quote Dr Sheldrake:

"Thinking about fungi makes the world look different. The longer I’ve studied their behaviours and remarkable abilities, the more fungi have loosened the grip of my certainties about how the world works.”

And I close with these final words of my own:

The inherent power to Heal our relationship with the Living Land is ours to Nurture. But it requires a new way of seeing ourselves in relation to everything else. It quietly asks us to consider the interconnectedness of the whole shebang. I welcome you to this Healing thought. I cannot think of anything Lovelier than this.

Thank you for your listening today.

May you be well!

Jill M. MacCormack